QualiPSoBoosting Innovation and growth by fostering Open Source

Matteo Melideo QualiPSo Project Coordinator

LINUX Foundation Collaboration Summit8-10 April 2009 – San Francisco

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Project Identity Card

• Project Acronym: QualiPSo• Project Title: Quality Platform for Open Source Software• Project instrument: Integrated Project• Contract Number: 034763• Consortium: 18 organisations from 9 countries (3 continents) • Thematic area: Open development Platforms for

software and services • Duration: 48 months (important results from every year)• Budget: 17.3 MEuro (Funding 10.4 MEuro)

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Topics

• The context ...– ... impact on economy– ... recommendations

• QualiPSo– ... the mission– ... the challenges– ... the approach– ... the network

• The research activities and results• Collaborations with Fossbazaar• A final request

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The context...

• Open source is not new concept but IT economic context is changing ...

– Increased need of cooperation and collaboration enabled by the Internet

– Most of the new business are conceived to be web based (SaaS)– Open Standard and open source software foster

commoditization (with all the pros and cons that this may imply)– The policy makers start to be sensible to the OSS arguments

(China, Brazil, some European countries already started a massive adoption of OSS in the PA)

• ...the economy is changing and benefiting from this paradigm shift...

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... impact on economy

• Economies are evolving from product orientation to service orientation

• Open Source is a chance for industries to foster growth and increase competitiveness

• Open Source is one of the top IT issues (Gartner source)

• Open Source as the engine of the Service Economy– For the service providers to keep the service cost as lower

as possible– For the service consumer (citizens) to have more

competition– For the Software Industry to have more resources for

innovation– For Public Administration to release resources to boost and

support local employment

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... recommendations*

• Product Maturity– Ease of use, breadth of functionality– Ease of deployment and management– Stability– Governance– Architecture dependencies– Product road maps

• Market Presence– Number of users– Size, commitment and organization of development team– Availability of trusted distribution, support, certification, training,

indemnification and other services– Presence and vitality of a commercial "ecosystem"

* Gartner Source

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QualiPSo project...

• A unique alliance to help industries and governments to fuel innovation and competitiveness in today’s and tomorrow’s global environment by providing the way to use trusted low-cost, flexible open source software to develop innovative and reliable information systems.

• The largest open Source project funded by the European Commission under its sixth framework program (FP6), as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) initiative

• 18 founding members, across Europe, Brazil and China

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... The mission

IT IS ALL ABOUT TRUST!Trust cannot be claimed without being

proved!!!

• To define and implement technologies, procedures and policies to leverage the Open Source Software development current practices to sound, well recognized and established industrial operations.

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... The Challenges

• Dismiss the popular myths against OSS that prevent the industrial commitment

• Prove the quality of the OSS for the industry

From rebellion TO industrial practices keeping the freshness and enthusiasm of

OSS tradition

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... the approach

INSURE

Industry

PRODUCE

Community

TRUST

LegalQuality

Interoperability

Business

OrganisationLife Cycle Maturity

Factory

USE

TelcoeGov Enterprise

Paris

Sao Paulo

RomaMadrid

Guangzhou

Berlin

… Alliance of Industry & Community to build trust on Open Source

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The Network...

• QualiPSo CCs form a Network (federative model) sharing the same ethics, methods and tools

• Act locally and cooperate globally

• Provide expertise and a common set of services on a variety of topics related to quality

• Each CC has its own legal model and be self-sustainable

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The research activities and results

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Legal Issues

• Objective: improving legal quality of open source software

– Understand legal questions around open source • How to evaluate risks & responsibilities? Are

licences compatibles? What are the constraints at international level? etc.

• Main results:– multinational reference portal for accessing accurate,

qualified and neutral information about legal issues for Open Source,

– resources for the community to understand and address the problems of license compatibility, liabilities and risk related to using OSS

– methodologies to track intellectual property rights during the software development cycle.

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• Objective: to identify all circumstances that are relevant for using Open Source in industry

• Main Results:– Ease and stimulate the integration of open source

components in industrial systems and applications– Define strategies for attitude, cooperation and

dialogues between industries & open source communities

– Hybrid solutions (products)– Define viable « Business models » for applications

using open source components

Business Models

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Interoperability

• Objective: provide qualified integration approach and test environment to foster and demonstrate OSS interoperability across borders of any kind.

• Three research axes:– Technical interoperability (open standards,

middleware, interoperability testing)– Semantic interoperability (shared and harmonized

information models)– Organizational interoperability (interworking of

processes and cross-organizational cooperation)• Main results:

– Provide interoperability testing guidelines, analyse and enhance interoperability of OSS middleware and forges

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Information Management

• Objective: implementing best practices in information management (source code, documentation, etc.) to improve the productivity of OSS development and support.

• Main results:– Identify where information management can be

improved in OSS projects– Analyse the structure of information and data

manipulated in collaborative tools– Define and implement new tools for information

management

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Trustworthy results

• Objectives: Enabling the assessment of the trustworthiness of OSS products and components

• Main results:– validated, customizable OSS product trustworthiness

model– test suites, benchmarks– tools

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Trustworthy results: approach

• Goal oriented: driven by the needs of OSS “users” (they are our users too)

– developers, integrators, system administrators, product managers, clearing house members, end users, etc.

• Evidence-based– experiments, static and dynamic

measures, testing, tools, validated models• Iterative and incremental

– 2 iterations are planned

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Trustworthy results: Goals and Factors

• Find users' goals and trustworthiness factors

– Which product- and process-related trust factors are taken into account when selecting (or rejecting) OSS?

– Ranking of 35 factors based on 151 interviews

• factors grouped in eight groups according to importance

– More interviews are certainly useful

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Trustworthy results: What's out there?

• Find out which trustworthiness factors can be easily assessed

– What kind of information is out there to help “users” choose? What is missing?

– 32 OSS projects examined• several pieces of information that are

important to “users” are missing– We need to find ways for making this

information easily available

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Trustworthy results: Measures

• Define measures for trustworthiness (the Y) and its influencing factors (the X's)

– How can we measure OSS trustworthiness?

• the quality we want to predict/estimate– How can we measure product- and

process-related trustworthiness factors?• the factors that influence trustworthiness

– Measures have been defined for both• based on users' goals

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Trustworthy results: Dynamic Analysis

• Users often use dynamic information– What is the role of testing in OSS?– Can we define sensible OSS

benchmarks?– Would it be possible to reuse/define

dynamic measures?– Study is underway

• collaborations would help come up with broader perspectives

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Trustworthy results: Tools

• Build supporting tools– Three families of tools

• test tools• measurement tools• data analysis tools

– Work is underway• collaborations would help us broaden our

set of applications

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Trustworthy processes: Overview

Vision

Through the definition of a CMMI-like model for FLOSS to improve the trust in

FLOSS software

Allow companies to use FLOSS to build their mainstream products and

services

How?

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Trustworthy processes: Trustworthy elements (1/2)

1. Quality of documentation: exhaustive and easy to be understood (PDOC)

2. Popularity of the FLOSS product (REP)3. Use of established, well-known widespread standards

(STD)4. Availability and use of a roadmap (RDMP)5. Quality of the test plan (QTP)6. Relationship among different stakeholders (STK)7. Existence of a decision-making process to choose

licenses/include disclaimer texts (LCS)

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Trustworthy processes: Trustworthy elements (2/2)

8. Existence of a well-established set of development tools (ENV)

9. Vitality of the development process and adequacy of the bug fixing process (DFCT)

10. Enforcing maintainability and stability of the FLOSS product/process (MST)

11. Contribution to FLOSS Product from SW Companies (CONT)

12. Availability of relevant assessment results concerning the project (RASM)

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Trustworthy processes: OMM

PDOC, STD, QTP, LCS, ENV, DFCT, MST

Basic Level +REP, RDMPSTK, RASM, CONT

From CMMI Maturity Level 2Intermediate Level

Basic Level

Advanced Level

Implemented FLOSS-TWEs:

From intermediate Level

Implemented CMMI PAs:

From CMMI Maturity Level 2 and 3

Optional, from CMMI

Maturity Level 2

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QualiPSo Factory

Objective: designing and implementing the “QualiPSo Factory”, an integrated environment to facilitate and support the development of industrial OSS systems.Main results:

– Create/integrate a next generation forge portal• With all communication tools• With the concepts and tools for cooperative

development– Implement tools to evaluate the quality of components

• Define metrics and classification tools• Integrate automatic tools for control, measure…

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Competence centres

• Objective: developing a long-lasting network of professionals caring for the quality of open source software for enterprise computing

– Independent competence centers in Europe, China, Brazil

– Dedicated resources. May be specialized– Will run the collaborative platforms, tools and process

developed in this project • Main results:

– Set up to support the development, deployment and adoption of OSS by private and public Information Systems Departments, large companies, SMEs, ISVs.

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Collaborations with Fossbazaar

• For QualiPSo is important to increase the visibility also in USA then

– To create a community of interest around the two initiatives

– Exchange of mutual feedbacks for the benefits of both

– Joint workshop organization• Produce a position paper on specific

subject (e.g. Quality, Legal Issues, etc.)– Reference each other initiative to the respective

Web sites– ...

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●To visit our web site and fill our on-line questionnaires●To provide feedbacks on our archived results●To be part of the QualiPSo Community

A final request...

Thank you for the opportunity on behalf of the QualiPSo Project

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Contact

Matteo Melideo, PMP(Head of Service Engineering Unit)

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A.Tel: +39-0649-201-410Cell: +39-335-5728374email: matteo.melideo@eng.it

www.qualipso.org